Global Warming Creates a Stairway to Heaven

Climate change is leading to increased temperatures, especially noticeable in mountains and other cooler climes. Many animals and plants, especially in the tropics where temperatures are more uniform, prefer certain temperatures and may even die when it gets too hot.

Because it gets
cooler as one goes up a mountain, many plants and animals are moving higher to
compensate for increasing temperatures. That means they have less area to live in
and their numbers go down, which increases the chances of them going extinct
locally or globally, especially in flatter areas where there are fewer
mountains, and organisms can be “pushed off” mountains into extinction by
global warming. I call this effect “the escalator to extinction”.

Currently, 21% of world’s bird species face a risk of
extinction, defined as being threatened or near threatened with extinction
according to the World Conservation Union (IUCN). In our recent paper in the
scientific journal Conservation Biology,
titled “Climate change, elevational ranges, and bird extinctions” (Sekercioglu,
Schneider, Fay & Loarie, in press), we show that bird species’ elevational
ranges have a positive correlation with improved conservation status. Therefore,
reductions in birds’ elevational ranges caused by climate change are likely to
increase the extinction likelihood of a bird species. The increased risk of
extinction can be calculated by using the relationship we describe in our paper
and extinctions can be estimated by modeling elevational shifts that will be
caused by climate change. These relationships are likely to apply to other
terrestrial organisms (amphibians, mammals, etc), but more research is needed
on this.

Habitat change makes the situation worse because there may
be no habitat to move into in many places, even if the mountain is tall enough.
We combined habitat loss and global warming scenarios for 2100 to estimate the
numbers of land bird species that will be threatened and/or driven to
extinction by climate change by 2100. Our best guess is that climate change
effects, exacerbated by habitat loss, will result in about 400–550 land bird
extinctions by 2100, based on a best-guess of 2.8 °C warming. This is 5-7% of
all land bird species. With 1 °C surface warming or less, bird extinctions are
likely to remain below 100 species. In the worst case, however, with 6.4 °C
warming and extensive habitat loss, as many as 2500 land bird species may be
committed to extinction, 30% of all land birds. Aquatic birds, such as
penguins, are also threatened by climate change, but we did not estimate their
extinction likelihood, due to the different dynamics involved.

Each additional degree of warming will have increasingly
devastating effects. Bird extinctions increase faster than climate change, so
even slowing down climate change by a few degrees will save hundreds of bird
species. We have little data on many bird species and we urgently need much
better data on where the birds are and how they are responding to climate
change, especially on tropical mountains.

The take home message is that, climate change, exacerbated
by habitat loss, will reduce the ranges of hundreds of bird species, sometimes
to the point of extinction. With increasing warming, the extinctions will
increase in an accelerating fashion, not linearly, and will be especially
severe for tropical mountain species, most of which are endemic and have small
ranges. Our best guess is that climate change effects, exacerbated by habitat
loss, will result in about 400–550 land bird extinctions by 2100, based on a
2.8 °C warming. The worst case scenario predicts about 2500 bird extinctions,
30% of all land bird species or 26% of all bird species.

Until
now, habitat loss, exploitation (e.g. hunting, pet trade), and introduced
species (e.g. cats, rats, dogs, pigs) have been the main drivers of species
extinctions. These factors have mostly affected islands and lowlands, and
mountain species have been relatively safe. However, climate change will affect
intact montane (and polar) habitats most and its victims will mainly be those species
not presently threatened by habitat loss or hunting. Large numbers of species,
thus-far largely unaffected by human actions, are in danger of extinction from
climate change.

If we do not slow down climate change, we can expect
hundreds of bird extinctions. At the very least, that means the disappearance
of many fascinating life forms and the world will be the poorer for it. Birds
are one of the best conserved groups and most other groups (e.g. plants,
amphibians, fish, mammals, mollusks) are more threatened with extinction than
birds. The same extinction dynamics apply to many of them and many of these
species will also disappear due to the combined effects of habitat loss and climate
change. Disappearances of so many species will also have long-term ecological
effects that are very hard to predict, but are unlikely to be favorable to
humanity.

As warming is such a big concern, could winter 1939/40 teach us a lesson? Why are we still in the dark concerning the global cooling that started in winter 1939/40. Was it man-made? Meanwhile we know that the 1930s fairly matched the warmth of recent years. Autumn 1938 was in the top three over a 500 years period. And suddenly, when World War II commenced climate run amok. Europe was back in the Little Ice Age. Why?

Second World War was just 100 days old, the Russian-Finish Winter War mere three weeks, when a cold wave befell Finland around the 24th December about which the New York Times correspondent, James Aldridge, (NYT, 25 December 1939), reported as follows:

?The cold numbs the brain in this Arctic hell, snow sweeps over the darkened wastes, the winds howl and the temperature is 30 degrees below zero (minus 34.4 ? C). Here the Russians and Finns are battling in blinding snowstorms for possession of ice-covered forests. ?I reached the spot just after the battle ended. It was the most horrible sight I had ever seen. As if the men had been suddenly turned to wax, there were two or three thousand Russians and a few Finns, all frozen in fighting attitudes. Some were locked together, their bayonets within each other?s bodies; some were frozen in half-standing positions; some were crouching with their arms crooked, holding the hand grenades they were throwing; some were lying with their rifles shouldered, their legs apart?. Their fear was registered on the frozen faces. Their bodies were like statues of men throwing all their muscles and strength into some work, but their faces recorded something between bewilderment and horror.?

By mid February 1940, Northern Europe was totally unexpectedly in the coldest winter for 100 years, The New York Times reported on 16 February 1940, that Adolf Hitler?s Deputy, Field Marshal Herman Goering, said in a public speech one day earlier:

?Nature is still more powerful than man.
I can fight man but I cannot fight nature
when I lack the means to carry out such battle.
We did not ask for ice, snow and cold ?
A higher power sent it to us.?

The war criminal Goering erred in most things, also on 15. February 1940. Who if not the few month old war brought the Little Ice Age suddenly back to Europe? CO2 didn?t do it! More on: http://www.warchangesclimate.com .

And this doesn't take into account the dramatic change in faunal/floral assemblages as different species respond in different ways, because of different dispersal abilities, different sensitivity to temperature changes, etc. Communities will certainly become asymmetrical, with long-evolved adaptations suddenly useless in the face of new predators, parasites, prey, competitors, pollinators, habitat structure--so many variables. Avian malaria moving up the mountains in Hawaii and affecting the native honeycreepers is a simple example.